HERDING CATS

THEARTOFAM­ATEUR CRICKET CAPTAINCY

Cricket captaincy in Aus­tralia has long boiled down to pick­ing the best player. Call it the Brad­man model. As the au­thor writes, the Don de­voted more space in his in­struc­tional book to run­ning be­tween wick­ets than captaincy: “For him, ef­fec­tive lead­er­ship was av­er­ag­ing 99.94.”

But what hap­pens when a cricket team’s tal­ent is far down the other end of the scale? Char­lie Camp­bell, skip­per of the Au­thors CC, seeks to know the an­swer of how to lead a mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful XI while also hav­ing to pre­pare food for the tea break.

Rather than Brad­man, the twin poles of this book are Mike Brear­ley and JM Bar­rie. Brear­ley, the for­mer Eng­land cap­tain-turned-shrink, pro­vides the tem­plate from his 1985 book The Art Of Captaincy; Bar­rie, the au­thor of Pe­ter Pan and a no­to­ri­ously bad crick­eter, only be­came a cap­tain be­cause no team wanted him, so he formed his own.